I'm blue collar and deal with that sort of thing. In the last ten years it's actually gotten worse. It's like we're giving them tooling that's more "they can make it work" than something with an obvious interface. Things I think are pretty basic (give mechanics star knobs, not bolts) are just fucking ignored. Tooling should get out of the way of your job as much as possible, not require even more tools to manage it.

This isn't just putting shit together, though. Most assembly tasks aren't tight tolerance, but they always involve multiple specs that each person is supposed to at least know about. I haven't been through production training, but the production people I interact with scare me sometimes, and it's not their fault if the importance of quality isn't adequately explained.

But I made it clear I wasn't blaming them in the first post, so I'm not even sure where that came from.